The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.

What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.

'Life', said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.